After resisting the temptation for several months, I finally broke down this week and bought an Apple Pencil. I purchased the initial iPad Pro back in November when it first came out, but sold it and switched to the 9.7-inch model last week, and so far I’ve been very happy with that choice. Figuring that I’ll probably stick with this size iPad Pro for at least a year, I decided the Apple Pencil would be a worthwhile investment. And I was right.

I was skeptical of the Apple Pencil when it was first announced, as I assumed it would just be the same as the tacky styluses third-parties had been making for years, but after using it I’ve realized just how wrong I was. The thing that I noticed very early on in my time with the Apple Pencil though, was how crazy good the palm rejection is. Writing with an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro is nearly as easy as writing on actual paper. As a student, this is a huge factor for me when it comes to note taking, so I decided to dive a little deeper into the apps on iOS that are made for taking notes and are optimized for iPad Pro. Here are some of the ones I would recommend…

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GoodNotes 4

GoodNotes is an app that I wasn’t entirely familiar with until I purchased my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, but I’ve quickly realized that it’s one of, if not the most, complete note taking apps available in the App Store. You have the ability to create multiple notebooks – like one for each class or subject – and then create individual pages within each notebook with varying page styles. There’s also the ability to insert charts and images which definitely comes in handy.

GoodNotes also indexes your notes so you can quickly search them. I have pretty awful handwriting, but it was still able to correctly index my notes and allow me to search through them when I needed to. It also supports the Apple Pencil for pressure sensitive writing, something that really comes in handy while taking extensive amounts of notes at a time.

To me, GoodNotes 4 felt most similar to traditional notebooks when it came to taking notes. It really felt like writing with pen and paper, just modernized with many new features. GoodNotes 4 is available for $7.99 on the App Store and is definitely worth it.

Notability

Notability and GoodNotes are very similar apps on the surface, and if anything, Notability feels slightly more polished and easier to use than GoodNotes. It offers many of the same features as other handwriting apps, including palm-rejection, pressure sensitivity detection, and the ability to insert images, charts, and even full webpages. That last feature is notable as it means you can import a webpage and highlight and mark it up as you go, something that’s important for working through research projects and the like.

One thing that’s unfortunately missing and that will ultimately force me to stick with GoodNotes, however, is the ability to search handwritten notes. While you can search PDF text, any notes you write by hand are not capable of being searched.

On the bright side though, Notability is currently 33 percent off on the App Store, making it just $3.99 as of this post.

Notes Plus

Notes Plus is another solid note taking app with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil optimizations. In addition to standard features like PDF and image support, folder management, and shape detection, Notes Plus includes a few standout features. For one, it supports a built-in browser for quickly and easily looking up facts and statistics. Additionally, it supports the ability to covert handwritten notes to text.

This means that any handwritten notes are also searchable and later annotatable, unlike with Notability. There’s also support for recording background audio. For instance, if you’re in a lecture, you can be recording that lecture directly into the app so you can later go back and listen to it to ensure you didn’t miss anything.

Notes Plus is currently 30 percent off in the App Store, making it $6.99 as of this past.

Noteshelf

In terms of pure writing experience, Noteshelf offers one of the smoothest experiences of any of these apps. The app supports the Apple Pencil and offers integration with Spotlight on iOS so you can quickly find different documents and notebooks. Unfortunately, there’s no way to search within handwritten notes like with Penultimate and GoodNotes.

One nice feature of Noteshelf, however, is that you can add a passcode to protect important and sensitive notes, much like what Apple added to its Notes app with iOS 9.3.

Noteshelf prides itself as the best note-taking app that offers the most beautiful handwriting effect – this is one of the key reasons why our users fall in love with Noteshelf. It perfectly mimics that intuitive ink-on-paper feeling so smoothly, it’s as if you’re using a real pen and paper.

Evernote

Evernote isn’t the most feature-rich app when it comes to using the Apple Pencil for note taking, but if you already use Evernote across other devices, it’s nice to stay in the same ecosystem. The stylus can be used for essentially handwriting notes in the most basic format. Evernote is more reasonable to use if you’re typing notes and need to quickly sketch a chart or a diagram. For use cases like this, Evernote’s “Snap to Shape” feature is useful.

The biggest selling point of Evernote is its cross-platform availability, so if you’re often switching between devices and operating systems for taking notes, then Evernote might be your best bet. It’s available on the App Store for free with various premium upgrades.

Penultimate

Made by Evernote, Penultimate is the company’s more advanced take on a handwriting app. Penultimate features a distraction-free interface that makes it easy to quickly and easily take down notes without accidentally changing settings or navigating away from the writing interface. The app is optimized for iPad Pro, as well, which means that it supports pressure sensitivity, so you can push harder for thicker lettering and lighter for more faint writing.

Furthermore, and perhaps most notably, Penultimate analyzes your handwritten notes and allows you to search for handwritten text in the app. Penultimate is free with a host of in-app purchases to improve your experience.

Apple Notes

You can’t discuss note taking apps without mentioning Apple’s own Notes app that comes pre-installed on every iOS device. Prior to iOS 9, Apple’s Notes app was pretty lackluster in comparison to many note taking apps on iOS. With the new operating system, however, the app is gaining on third-party solutions. It still doesn’t support things like searching notes or even different page styles, but it’s improving.

There are however, new features such as additional font formatting options, support for inline checklists, and link thumbnail + textual previews.

Wrap-up

Ultimately the moral of the story here is that the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro have convinced me that the iPad is now a viable way to quickly take notes in a variety of settings. Whether it be in meetings or in class, the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro paired with any of these apps makes for a note taking experience equivalent to that of pen and paper.

Personally, after trying all of these apps, I think GoodNotes 4 is the most solid choice for iPad Pro note taking. Its amazing handwriting recognition and search feature really sets it apart from the competition. For someone with awful handwriting, I didn’t think a feature like that would ever work for me. But GoodNotes proved me wrong.

What do you use for taking notes with your iPhone/iPad? Let us know in the comments!

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or serious. The pencil should be included with every “Pro” model. Actually the Apple wizards should have figured out a way to house the pencil in the tablet. I can’t be the only person on the planet that thinks this way. When Samsung had the Note Tablet each one was built this way and the price reflected what you got. Even the Samsung Note from the very beginning had the S-Pen built into the phone.
Apple can make a $400 phone just as fast as a $650 one but they can’t include the Pencil in a tablet priced $100 more than the non-pro models? Who’s making these silly decisions?

Its actually $200 more now,since they marked the Air 2 down to $399. Yes, for the $599 entry wifi, $739 of entry LTE or $749 for the mid tier wifi Apple should included the pencil.

They should also enable the 3D Touch gestures in an IoS update. The pencil is capable of sensing the pressure and doing #D Touch gestures using the Pencil. Apple wants to advertise it as a PC replacement it should come with the pencil or smart keyboard. The Surface Pro 4 comes with a stylus and seperately Microsoft charges $59 for it.

I was looking yesterday at tmobile online site and you can have the pencil’s price spread throughout your installment plan for the iPad.

I was beeing serious. The Apple Pencil is great but 110€ for his thing is seriously overpriced. Apple won’t give you anything with the iPad Pro, they won’t even give you the charger it needs to charge properly.

I paid around $100 for an Adonit Jot Touch 4 back in the day. The Apple Pencil is easily a superior experience. I think $100 is an extremely good price point for such a tool that allows so much for artists and note-taking.

Question: The Apple Pencil may be tracked equal as the Beacon?
So, is there any “Back to my Apple Pencil” yet?
If not could be very trick to search and find this little expensive iGadget…
What do you think?

my thoughts exactly. Free, crossplatform (on the job it’s windows, at home I’m on a mac) and cross device (ipad, iphone, mac, PC). Very good piece of software. And that is hurting me to admit it, being very skeptical of MS software. But my absolute number one note taking app is oneNote.

Onenote is good after a few days ago adding draw-with-touch switch button (palm rejection) for 9.7 iPad Pro. When I use the onenote with 9.7 for the first week, it pissed me off that they didn’t even have a palm rejection, but it supports Apple Pencil pressure sensitive, which confused me for a while.

OneNote may be a good option if you’re already in the Microsoft ecosystem. OneNote for iOS cannot export notes into another (industry standard) format. Also, it does not support cloud storage other than OneDrive. So unless you also have OneNote for the desktop, your notes are not portable if you use OneNote for iOS – your notes are captive to OneNote and OneDrive.

It’s very limited if you only have the free version. It cannot export and does not support cloud storage other than OneDrive. It may be cross-platform but you are stuck with OneNote due to lack of export and cloud storage options, unless you also have the desktop version.

I use Noteability everyday on my 12.9″ iPP for raking notes in class (and research notes). It has an absolutely perfect writing experience with a “no clutter” interface that really makes the 12.9″ iPP feel just like a piece of paper.

In addition it has a great OS X app that syncs perfectly and automically with its iOS counterpart.

It’s the only one that can import PDFs INTO your documents, and the only one where you can select a PART of a PDF, copy it, and paste it somewhere! Great for copying exercises enunciates and pasting where you are going to solve them.

Altough notability “drawings” that you can embed and the resize are quite nice, GoodNotes is

friedmud1 - 2 years ago

Biggest issue with Goodnotes is that it doesn’t have continuous scrolling. Continuous scrolling is highly superior when you’re taking notes in class or if you’re trying to study off of your notes.

Question: is this a list for note-taking apps only? ‘Cause if it isn’t, if it includes sketching/drawing apps as well, then you missed a HUGE one: AdobeSketch. I too bought an Apple Pencil last week and AdobeSketch has been my main app to use it with since day one. It’s awesome and it’s free. Worth a shot.

I use Notability for several items, and love it. One killer feature is the ability to record background audio and have any writing or typed matched up with timing in the recording. This makes it really easy to go back and find details in a class or meeting by just notating the main points.

Another good Notability feature is that you have an iPhone version available that syncs up via iCloud.

I’ve been using Notes Plus since the original iPad and it has never let me down. It’s the most complete Note-Taking app available.
It also has handwriting recognition and searching and it supports almost all languages (in my case Persian)
They are also working on an iPhone version and it will be available soon!

How well does the handwriting-to-text work in Notes Plus? I tried it before on an iPadAir with different styluses, but the experience was not that great (mostly because of the styluses, no matter the price). I think the Apple Pencil/iPad Pro coupled with a good handwriting-to-text app would be great in the health care setting, where there haven’t been great options for inputting data into a medical record. While I doubt a electronic medical records EMR) would incorporate handwriting-to-text anytime soon, it might be possible to write what you can in Notes Plus and copy-paste into an EMR interface.

It’s good, not great and depends on neat handwriting. I prefer Notes Plus of the bunch for the handwriting to text conversion and best looking pen simulation. I haven’t found another note app that captures handwriting as nicely as the “fountain pen” style. Notes Plus *does* work with Apple Pencil, but does not support all features like pressure variation.

A possible EMR solution: “my script stylus” is a keyboard replacement that works with a stylus

Notability is the only one that works for me, because it saves notes as PDFs automatically so I don’t have to always convert them after I’m finished, which can take a while, like with Goodnotes. It’s really annoying with Goodnotes if your forget to convert all the time, after every edit, because all you have is an unreadable file in Dropbox. On top of that Goodnotes changes my strokes a bit, where as notability don’t.
However the omission of pfd rotation is really annoying in notability.

Onenote can’t even export, so that not even an option for most people.

I have been using noteshelf for awhile now, but something had caused my Adonit stylus to now work as well with it – with the Apple Pencil now it is awesome. I do however wish it had search capability, and also wish you could have notebooks that contain PDF files nested in other notebooks – or have separate bookshelves based on subjects. I use it extensively to import PDF meeting agendas and to take notes at meetings. Another nice feature is export to Evernote (a feature you have to purchase additionally).

I looked at several note-taking apps when I bought my iPad pro 12.9”, well actually 6 weeks later, when the pencil arrived.
None of them does handwriting recognition very well, my 18 year old Newton beats them all, hand down.

None of them provides good desktop/laptop and iPad compatibility either, except for Microsoft’s OneNote. Again, none of them let le mix typed text and sketches on one page, except MS OneNote. So I eventually settled down on that and I do not regret it. The 15 GB of free OneCloud space don’t hurt either, and there is no daily limit, like with Evernote.

I am wondering if you have noticed the lagging difference btw 12 iPP and the 9.7 iPP. I kinda feel that the 9.7 iPP has a more perceivable drawing lag especially when you compare the performances on notability with these two models. Notability on 12 iPP has almost no lag, as good as the drawing experience in Note.app. But when drawing in Notability on the 9.7 iPP, the lag is not even close to that in the Note.app.

I have been using Note Taker HD for years and also love it. I use it in classes I teach, basically I load up some PDF templates on my iPad, and then write on them to fill in some blanks as we go through the material. It has good editing capabilities, and fluid writing with a zoomed in box. Among all the many apps I tried, this one had the most fluid/natural writing feel.

Unfortunately, however, as far as I know, Note Taker HD has not yet added Apple Pencil support.

Ever since getting my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, I have been looking for the perfect note app to replace pen and paper.

I tried all of the apps on this list and GoodNotes is an amazing app. The things that made it stand out for me are the search feature, convert to text and the ability to bookmark.
However, there is a BUT…I cannot give GoodNotes 5 stars because the app uses too much battery. I hope they patch this soon and make it an excellent app.

If you are looking for a good FREE app that does writing to text conversion Memo is great.
Finally, as a project manager, I need to take meeting minutes, and OneNote is my favorite app for that (since I setup a template)

You missed so many apps. Notes Plus, for instance, is a very richly-featured app and works in split screen mode on the iPad Pro. Paper is another very good, popular app that’s incredible with the Apple Pencil. UPAD 3 is still another. I’m dismayed at your lack of research. This just seems that app developers paid you to write about their apps and you didn’t dig very much.

Thanks for this article. I agree that Goodnotes performs very well in meetings with handwritten notes on PDF and/or Microsoft office documents. I use Readlle’s PDF Expert to convert office files to PDF and then share it into Goodnotes. From there I make my notes during meetings

So I have read many articles lately on retention is better when one takes notes on paper with a pen vs. typing on a laptop or a keyboard. Any experiences or research on retention when using notes on an iPad with the pencil vs. a laptop? Thanks in advance for the perspective.

Wierd how many are complaining about the price. When you factor in that a moleskine can cost up to 20usd or more, the notability’s 4usd is nothing. Plus you can reuse notability for ever. A moleskine gets full before the term ends and you have to buy more. Over the course of four years, the cost add up. Not to mention that you can save more buying digital ebooks rather than physical text books. Using an ipad as note takimg definitely isn’t that bad. By the way, for the price of the apple pencil you can get two decent fountain pens. But you have to constantly buy inks for them too. So the cost can still add up. Going paperless definitely has its cost savings. And no more issues of coming to class/meeting with the wrong notebook/or forgetting to bring a notebook at all. Most of us have our ipads with us all the time.